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Matt Nolen
Matt Nolen

Conversations With Myself

Matt Nolen

As I prepare to begin my next body of work for an upcoming exhibition at the Catskill Art Space, it has been natural to look back and reflect on the arc of the work’s progression over my thirty-eight years in a clay studio. These objects have held the full spectrum of my life’s experiences, but perhaps the greatest catalysts have also been my greatest challenges.

My affinity for storytelling developed at an early age. I was born in the American South to a family that spent countless hours at the dinner table recounting the detailed, often humorous anecdotes and foibles of our ancestors, distant relatives, and fellow citizens of Gadsden, Alabama. I quickly learned that humor could create a seductive sugar coating to mask the bitter baggage of tales told of betrayal, failure, loss, hurt, and anger. Like young class clowns everywhere, I also discovered how effective making people laugh can be to distract and divert their attention away from my own insecurities, inadequacies, vulnerabilities, and untold secrets.

I moved to New York City in the early 1980s, a few days after graduating with a degree in architecture. I had always been a painter and, in my transition to the Big City, I began to pursue this with serious intent. A couple of years later, I found ceramics through a wheel-throwing class that I took at a neighborhood pottery in Hell’s Kitchen on the west side of midtown Manhattan. I immediately saw how my interests in architecture (form/function) and painting (surface) could literally be integrated into one through the firing process. This epiphany launched my thirty-eight years – and counting – of working in clay.

My early works were porcelain wheel-thrown shapes, which served as a canvas for a vocabulary of dense abstract geometric patterns and lavishly painted and carved surfaces. Although not overtly narrative in content, they seemed to capture the inescapable and cacophonous overload of stimulation from daily life lived in the city. I was also finding an audience for this work as they were sold exclusively at the Bergdorf Goodman department store for a few years. It was at the height of this halcyon time when the unimaginable happened: my partner was diagnosed with AIDS.

There are those times when the pathway you are traveling is unexpectedly and insurmountably blocked, and so you are forced to survive with a great sense of groundlessness before a new path emerges. I found in this difficult moment that in groundlessness, my work can potentially progress the most. As I now find myself saying to my students, "All of the challenges, pain, uncertainty, and also the joy can be cathartically injected into your work."

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Author Bio

Matt Nolen

Matt Nolen is a studio artist living and working in New York City and Narrowsburg, New York. Trained as a painter and architect, Nolen’s work includes sculptural objects and architectural installations using clay and mixed media. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in numerous private and public collections, including: The Cooper-Hewitt Museum, NYC; The Museum of Arts and Design, NYC; The Newark Museum, New Jersey; The Houston Museum of Fine Art, Texas; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The de Young Museum, San Francisco, California; and The Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York.
Nolen’s work has been written about and reviewed in many periodicals and books, including: The New York Times; American Ceramics; Ceramics: Art and Perception; Masters of Craft; Confrontational Clay; Postmodern Ceramics; Painted Clay; and Sexpots.
Nolen has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Mid-Atlantic Foundation (regional NEA) Fellowship, and international residencies in Italy, Israel, Canada, and China. His residency at the Kohler Co.’s Art/Industry Program resulted in a handmade public washroom that has been named "Best Restroom in America" by the Cintas Corp. and among "The 10 Best Bathrooms in the World" by the Travel Channel.
He has served as president of the board of trustees for the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine, and is currently serving as trustee of the Robert M. MacNamara Foundation and advisor to The Swimming Hole Foundation. Nolen is an adjunct professor of art at New York University, Hunter College, and the ceramics area coordinator at Pratt Institute.

Artist Website

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